Tellabs - Optical LAN enables superior traffic management

The days of building local area networks (LAN) to support telephones, desktop workstations and locally switched traffic have passed. Ten years ago, LANs were designed to support peer-to-peer traffic flows because 80% of the traffic stayed local, but today it is expected that 90% of LAN traffic flows directly to the Wide Area Network (WAN) [Figure 1].

LAN traffic has made a 180-degree change in direction because of browser-based applications, wireless (e.g. 5G, Wi-Fi), employee personal traffic, hosted/managed and cloud-based services. The modern high-performance corporate LANs need to support new smart building systems, a wide range of mobile devices (e.g. BYOD), cloud computing and a constant influx of new software applications. IT professionals also find themselves balancing corporate data, employee personal data, external malicious attacks and internal security vulnerabilities.